Nutritional Heresy №2: Saturated Fat Is Not Just Harmless, It’s Healthy
It’s only been bad for you since the 1950s
Advice on saturated fat is usually paired in sentences with sugar. “Diets high in saturated fat and sugar will kill you”, or something along these lines, is a common caution. This is defamation of character. Unlike sugar, saturated fat is a giver, not a killer, as anyone who really knows anything about nutrition will tell you.
As a rule of thumb, you can rest assured that anything that humans have survived on, since coming down from the trees to live on the land, can’t be all that bad. Anything that only recently came out of a factory after undergoing a lengthy production process is probably very bad indeed. Stick with that and you’ve cracked the basics of human nutrition.
It’s all an illusion anyway
What’s so absurd about the general view of saturated fat is that it doesn’t actually exist as a single entity. Instead, there are lots of different saturated fatty acids, each with a unique structure and function.
“Saturated” means saturated with hydrogen, making the fat generally solid at room temperature (think butter or lard).
That’s the first thing that makes them healthy: because they are saturated with…
